


And You Know That Wyoming'll Be Your New Home

by Anonymous



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, Bounty Hunters, F/M, Flashbacks, Redemption, Survivor Guilt, War Crimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 01:53:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29199420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The man who calls himself Murphy rides west from Sangeda on a borrowed horse.Maybe he'll be back one day.Probably he won't be.He rides west, and they're hot on his trail, and the ghost riding behind him laughs and tells him he's being an idiot.
Relationships: Emori/John Murphy (The 100)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8
Collections: Anonymous, Non Anonymous TROPED Collection





	And You Know That Wyoming'll Be Your New Home

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [For It's Your Misfortune (Ain't None of My Own)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29193714) by [the_most_beautiful_broom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_most_beautiful_broom/pseuds/the_most_beautiful_broom). 



> So this is a companion piece to Anonymous's "For It's Your Misfortune (Ain't None of My Own)", which is an awesome piece and one that you should definitely read first before reading this one!
> 
> (As a matter of fact, you should probably read all of the excellent Troped competing fics before you read this one.)
> 
> Anyhow, I wrote this for the competition but didn't want to compete, since I figured people who are actually in the 100 fandom should get first dibs on that whole deal, haha

_Two men are standing in the street._

_Their hands are still empty, and the air between them is still empty, and the streets around them are still empty, and they are both still just standing._

_This will change._

_This will change, and then everything will be over._

_The wind moves gently down the space between the buildings, carries the silence with it, and there are all the others who have fallen in the space between where it all began—_

_And here._

_The place where it ends._

_This is the way it ends: there are two men standing in the street._

The man who calls himself Murphy rides west for four days, and then he hangs a left and heads south.

No real clear idea of where he’s going, not just yet, but he’s still moving, and that’s the important part.

It doesn’t really matter.

Not really.

They’ll find him, soon enough, no matter where he goes.

It’s just a matter of distance, that’s all.

Got to get enough space between here and where he was that it won’t cause any problems.

He’s not stupid, of course.

He still takes steps to cover his tracks, because it’s not like he wants them hot on his trail, not necessarily.

It’s just that he’d put an awful lot of work into making sure that little backwater town came out of things okay, thanks very much, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to let it all get turned to ash the second he hits the road.

_Idiot,_ he thinks, as soon as the thought crosses his mind. _You’ll be damned anyways._

It almost makes him smile.

Nothing for that now.

And anyhow, even if it’s true, then the least he can do is try and look out for the rest of them, right?

Isn’t that a good sort of thing to do?

How should he know?

How on this earth—any earth—should he know?

So he covers his tracks, because it wouldn’t be right to make the game too easy, and then he rides south on a borrowed horse—south on a dead man’s borrowed horse—and he goes from town to town, each smaller than the last, and he leaves before anyone can wonder why it is that he doesn’t sleep, or why the wounds on his hands and on his back heal quicker than they have any right to do.

It’s alright.

It’s all alright.

This is, after all, what he was made for.

No, not _made._

What he was _designed_ for, that’s the better word.

He builds no campfire, when he leaves each new settlement, and the coyotes and creatures that shift around the darkness and make noises on the edge of the night—

They never come near him.

They must know better than that.

Murphy sits on the rolled-up blanket that he picked up—sometime ago, he hardly knows when—and he stares up at the stars and the strange, blue-black sky.

The stars are all wrong, here.

Everything looks so very, very different.

His hands burn with a burst of remembered power, and he stares up at the stars and rubs the backs of his hands together until the itching stops and he no longer remembers the warmth of someone else’s human skin beneath his burning palms.

It takes him two whole weeks to realize that the bartender must have lied to the Federation.

No way their scouts haven’t made it to Sangeda by now, not with the amount of power flying around the air, towards the end.

And they’ll follow the same route he did—programming’s the same, after all—which means that Emori will be the first one they ask, their first stop on the hunt for information.

If she told them the truth—

He’d have seen them by now.

Seen some sort of sign, even if he hadn’t seen Crane and the rest of the pack, would’ve seen some clue that they were onto his trail.

So she must have lied.

The thought strikes Murphy out of nowhere, middle of the day without a cloud in sight, and he’s just sitting there in the middle of the open expanse of prairie—

“Huh,” he says out loud, and his horse makes a chuffing noise in response.

That’s—unexpected.

She probably shouldn’t have done that.

If they find out she’s lied—if they suspect she’s lied—will they go back?

Will they go back, waste time extracting the truth?

They might not, he thinks, and the horse shifts its weight beneath him again.

Crane’s opinion of other civilizations has never been overly high.

It cost them, time and time again, before— _in the good old days,_ Murphy thinks wryly.

He never had much time for other worlds.

So they won’t go back.

They’ll assume she forgot, or was confused, just another stupid, underdeveloped little life form on another stupid, underdeveloped little world.

So it’ll be alright.

Of course, that means there’s no real reason for _him_ to go back, either, because Crane will leave Emori alone—leave the whole town of Sangeda alone—and that means there’s no real reason for him to turn back just yet.

That’s alright, too, Murphy thinks.

It’s probably a good thing.

The horse makes another soft huff of air that, coming from a human, would sound uncomfortably like a laugh.

“Shut up,” Murphy tells it, and touches his heels to its sides so that it starts off again.

The sun beats down on his bare head, and he thinks if he were anyone else, his skin might have started to burn by now.

Instead, he hears the hum of the implants in the base of his skull, working overtime to pump out the ground tissue and collagen, and he feels nothing at all except a slight itch where the skin is overwriting itself, healing as soon as it burns.

His hands hurt, and when he looks down, he sees that he’s clenched them into fists to keep them from shaking.

_This is the way it begins: the war is over—_

_No, wait, that’s not right._

_That isn’t where it begins._

_Go further back, past all of that, back to where it all started—_

_There is a boy in a field, looking up at a purple sky—_

_(No, that’s too far, and really, it was never about him, it was never about any one of them—cogs in a machine, and not a single one of them ever really all that remarkable.)_

_Alright, then, here._

_This is the way it begins: there are lights in the sky, and people are afraid._

So they’re after him now.

Oh, well.

It’s not a surprise, not really.

Emori, she’d bought him time, but he’d have been an idiot to believe that it was ever a real reprieve.

There’s only one escape, he thinks, and he’s not overly fond of that option just yet.

Murphy looks up through the branches of the tree, pushes his hand into the horse’s shoulder to make it stay still, keep quiet and not draw attention.

High overhead, there is a bird.

It flies in great, meandering loops, head turning slowly back and forth, eyes scanning the ground below.

He heard the whine of its servers sometime before dawn, had nearly dragged the horse off of the trail and into the woods, scuttled his own trail just in time before fleeing back to the relative safety of the trees.

He breathes in, out, in again, holds his breath for a second too long—

His core temperature drops another few degrees.

It’s not his temperature he’s worried about so much as it is the horse’s, because they’ll know better than to look for his heat signature, out here in the middle of nowhere.

But a horse, that’s a lot harder to hide, and Murphy never was the best at being a team player, so it’s not like he’s had a lot of practice covering another body’s signature.

The horse shivers, huffs out an icy breath, and Murphy glares at it, but doesn’t dare raise his voice.

It didn’t take them very long.

Three weeks, give or take.

Three weeks, and that was with the false information that Emori gave them, and that means that they’re getting better or maybe that he’s getting slower or maybe only that he’s been a complete idiot and not gone nearly as far from Sangeda as he should have done, right at the start.

He should change his face, he knows.

He should find a human who isn’t using their own, talk them into swapping faces, get rid of the horse and start over again.

Standard operating procedure.

He knows how these things are done.

Because, honestly, it’s just a matter of time before someone comes up with a description, and then all the distance in the world won’t keep him safe, not from Crane and the rest of the hunters.

Should change his face.

It’s really the only move left.

The only _smart_ move left, anyhow, and that’s mostly the same thing.

Up above, the thing that looks like a bird cries out once, and then soars away, and Murphy ignores the targeting computer that tries to push its way into his vision, because a gunshot now would only end the game before its time.

He doesn’t change his face.

He’s never claimed to be the smart one in any unit.

He doesn’t change his face, because he _likes_ this face, and that’s the only reason, no matter what anyone else says.

Not that there’s anyone else _to_ say anything.

He heads west again, because it would just be a rookie mistake, to keep heading one way without changing it up even a little.

He heads west until he gets to the ocean, and the days are starting to get colder, and he stands next to the horse on the cliffs that overlook the ocean and thinks about how cold the water below would be.

Then he heads south again.

It’s nice here, he thinks, a little bit busier than it was out by Sangeda, because there are people from all corners of the globe and roads already in place and places along the road that have been there for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Back home, before he left, Collins had tried to hide out in the small towns, far from any prying eyes.

Murphy had always thought that was sort of stupid.

The more people there are, the less they’ll remember a face.

That’s always the way it goes.

They found Collins after three days, and three days later, he’d been dead, and Murphy had hopped on the first hauler he could find, worked freight until they docked in one of the larger trade planets, and then he’d stolen a cruiser and never looked back.

They almost catch up to him once, just outside of San Francisco.

Murphy shatters his leg in three places when he jumps from the banks of the river, nearly blacks out until he remembers that if he loses consciousness, he’ll probably wake up at see, and sinks to the bottom of the river instead, waits until the shadows on the surface have passed by once more and he is alone.

Once they’ve gone, he waits another ten minutes, just to be safe, and then he pushes himself back up to the surface on the leg that isn’t broken, limps back to the campground where the horse is still waiting, and rides a day and a half back the way he’s come.

No pattern, that’s the important part.

Can’t leave any discernible pattern.

The stars wheel slowly by overhead, and Murphy lays flat on his back with the blanket under his head, and he grits his teeth against the pain as the bones click and creak their way back together.

His hands, lying flat at his sides, are just starting to shake again.

He presses them into the ground until they finally stop shaking, and everything is finally still.

_This is the way it goes: they ask for volunteers._

_The threat from beyond the stars, it’s so much bigger than anyone could have expected, and they can’t fight this the normal way, not the old way, they need something newer, something faster—_

_Something better._

_Question: how do you win a war?_

_Answer: you have to die._

_Over and over again, you have to die, unless—_

_Unless—what if—maybe—_

_Except what if you didn’t?_

_Except what if you couldn’t?_

_Not forever, of course, because everyone has to die, but what if—_

_To their credit, they do ask for volunteers._

He decides to stop over for a time in New Bank.

It’s a quiet little place—not nearly as busy as San Francisco, but a little busier than some of the other towns he’s passed along the way.

San Francisco will swallow it whole in a few years, he guesses—a hundred, at the most, but no more.

And then there will be nothing left, no sign that he was ever here to begin with.

Murphy wonders where he’ll be in a hundred years.

Maybe he’ll still be here.

Maybe he’ll be back this way again.

If he makes it down to Mexico, maybe he’ll just keep going.

Go all the way down to the end of the continent, and then turn around and go right back, all the way back up to the top and start again.

It’s a lot to consider.

It could take a very long time.

But he stops in New Bank for a while, heads into the first saloon he finds and chats with the man behind the bar.

It’s not the same.

He doesn’t know why he was expecting it to be.

The man behind the bar is friendly, in a professional sort of way, and Murphy asks about a room, puts down a few bills to cover the cost for the next few weeks.

This is standard operating procedure, too—take out a room for longer than you’ll need it, put that record down and leave it behind when you go.

He wonders whether they’ve gotten his fake name yet.

He doesn’t think Emori would have told them.

But it’s certainly possible that they’ve got it, all the same.

So he books the room under a false name—another false name—a false name other than the false name that he likes to use.

It could almost get complicated, if he weren’t paying attention.

He is, though, and so he pays for someone to take care of the horse, too, because that thing’s carried him halfway across the continent, at this point, and he figures the least he could do is make sure it’s got enough water or whatever.

He carries his pack upstairs to the room above the saloon, stares at the bed and wonders if he’ll actually sleep tonight.

It doesn’t seem very likely.

But there’s no point in taking a room if he’s not ever going to use it.

So he drops his pack beside the bed, checks the sight lines from the window, and then drags the bed over to the opposite wall, because that gets at least a little bit of cover.

So he’s in a new city, and this is just where he is now, he guesses.

The people in New Bank are— _nice_.

It’s not a surprise.

Most people are _nice_ , wherever he goes.

Doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re good or anything as foolish as that, just that they’re nice enough and they don’t ask questions—

The thought skitters sideways in his mind, and Murphy shakes his head.

_They don’t intrude_ , he corrects himself, safe inside his own brain. _They don’t push in where they’re not wanted, not really._

There’s a difference.

Precision of language was always pretty important.

“Just passing through,” Murphy says, when one of the other regulars at the saloon drops a few halfhearted probes into where he came from, before. “Just trying to see all there is to see in this world.”

The other man laughs, probably because he thinks Murphy’s only joking, and he doesn’t press any further, and that’s very _nice_ , too.

The kid who looks after his horse for him asks plenty of questions about where he’s been, what he’s seen, if it’s true that there are bandits in the middle territories, if he’s ever met a real Indian, if it’s true that all Mormons have seven wives, if he’s ever found gold on his way through the mountains—

Murphy gives him an extra dollar a day to stop talking so much, and after that, the two of them get along just fine.

He doesn’t change his face.

He should, he knows he should, and it’s not like it’s something he hasn’t done before, but he just—

He doesn’t.

At the very least, he does cut his hair.

It won’t be enough, not if it really comes down to it, but he goes to the little barbershop on the edge of the main street and lets the little old lady prattle on about what a nice face he’s got, and how she’ll just trim off the edges, leave the rest of it the way it is, and didn’t anyone ever teach him not to let his hair get into this mess in the first place—

Murphy thinks about how he could answer that, how he could say, _lady, the things they taught me could scare you right out of your mind—_

He doesn’t say that, though.

Instead, he matches his accent to hers, so closely that she believes the voice is really his own, and he ducks his head and acts bashful and embarrassed until she swats him upside the head, tells him that he’s done and to get out of her shop.

It’s nice, to pretend.

Nice to feel someone’s hand on his head without pushing or holding him down—

If the lady feels the scars that wrap around the crown of his skull, she doesn’t say anything.

_This is the way it happens: they lie._

_Doesn’t matter who you are, how low your birth._

_If you sign your name, you will never die._

_Turns out, there are ways around it._

_If—_

_If you’re smart and you’re proud and you’re patriotic and you don’t ask questions and you follow orders and you don’t cry out and you follow orders and you don’t ask questions and you don’t have anyone who’ll miss you and you don’t scream when the cutting starts and you follow orders and you follow orders and you follow orders—_

_This is the way it happens._

Murphy doesn’t dream.

As a rule, he doesn’t dream.

He’s not entirely certain on the logistics of it, but he’s pretty sure that sleep is an important part of dreaming, if only in the sense that one necessarily follows the other.

He does try, though.

On the first few nights, when he’s first arrived in town, he lies there with his eyes open, and then he screws them shut and tries to dream.

It’s—a little less than successful.

So instead he lets his mind drift, runs over the path from here, where he wants to go next, and he tells himself it's the next best thing to dreaming, anyhow.

Once or twice, he lets his mind drift all the way back to Sangeda.

This is dangerous territory, he knows, because he did a good thing there, he knows that he did, and there’s no point in tracing back over it—in his mind or in real life, either way, it doesn’t matter—

There’s no point.

So he lets his mind drift again, and if he has to stop once or twice to shake the sound of Emori’s laugh out of his head, the way her breath had caught when she told him to leave, even though that was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard, because if he’d left—if he’d left—

_You did leave,_ he reminds himself, dry.

But that’s alright.

Because he fixed things, first.

So that makes it alright.

In the morning, he goes about his business once more, charts the distance between here and the next big town, tries to figure out what his next moves should be.

It’s a trick question, of course.

There aren’t really a lot of moves for him to choose between.

One of the regulars from the saloon sees him from across the packed dirt streets, lifts a hand and calls a brief greeting, and Murphy feels himself waving back, mouth smiling politely without any input from his brain.

The kid who takes care of the horse asks him if he knows anything about shooting stars, and it’s just about all Murphy can do not to laugh right in his face.

His sixth night in New Bank, he closes his eyes, breathes in and out as slow as he can manage, and he’s not sure, but he thinks he might actually be about to fall asleep—

Behind his eyelids, a series of images bombard him so fast that they steal his breath right out of his throat, and he jolts awake with the taste of blood in his mouth and the smell of rot in his lungs.

A bird cries once, somewhere high overhead, and he knows that they’ve found him.

He runs.

Of course he does.

Really, it’s not like there are a lot of other options.

So he runs—goes and grabs the first drunk he can find in the saloon, pays him a hundred dollars to ride north as fast as he can, no questions asked, gives the drunk his hat and his coat and a hundred-dollar bill, and watches as the man tears off in cloud of dust, reeling from the drink and his own good luck—

He doesn’t give him the horse.

The bird screams, circling the town with eyes glowing red, and Murphy watches it soar off after the drunk with his hat—

Then he runs south.

Long-distance scanners, they’re real good for picking up body temperature readings and identifying basic patterns, but the replicator models were always pretty much shit at differentiating between non-Arkadian lifeforms.

So he’s got a head start.

He’s done more with less.

He runs, and he leaves the horse behind, tells himself that maybe he’ll come back for it and knows that he almost certainly won’t, and he left the kid enough money to take care of it for a while, but once that runs out, it runs out, and nothing he can do about it either way.

God, but he’s so tired of running.

There’s a part of him—tiny and childish and foolish, but there’s a part of him that wants to turn back, demand to know why they won’t just let him rest, he did everything they asked of him, he followed orders, can’t they just leave him alone?

It’s all he wants.

It’s all he wants.

_All I’ve ever wanted_ , Murphy thinks, two days out from New Bank and sitting in a tree somewhere, back pressed against the bark.

It’s a lie, of course.

Murphy’s not a total idiot.

He knows when he’s lying to himself.

But he’s tired, and he’s feeling very far away from everything, including himself, and he knows he’s lying, because more than anything else, the only thing he’s ever really wanted is to live.

Even at home, back before everything began, he wanted so badly to survive, wanted it so desperately that he agreed—that he _agreed_ —

Murphy pushes his hands into the bark of the tree, wonders when his knuckles began to bleed and realizes that it doesn’t matter, not really.

He wants to live.

As long as he wants to live, he’ll have to keep running.

There’s nothing for it.

Just the way that these things go.

Murphy holds his hands in front of him in the dark and watches as the cuts on his knuckles scab over, scar, fade right before his eyes, and then finally disappear altogether.

_This is the way it starts: the war is won._

_The war is won, and the treaty is signed, and now there’s just the little question of what to do with the creatures that used to be soldiers._

_No, not soldiers._

_War criminals._

_There’s just the little question of what to do with the creatures who used to be war criminals._

_Of course, they will be brought to justice under the new Federation._

_They’ll be given a fair trial, followed by a first-class execution._

_Question: how do you kill a supersoldier?_

_Short answer: carefully._

_Honest answer: slowly._

_These things do take time._

Three days later, he arrives in—somewhere.

Some new town, he doesn’t bother learning the name.

Doesn’t think it matters, all that much.

It’s just another stopping point.

Another temporary room.

He pays for a night in the hotel near the saloon, doesn’t give more than single-syllable responses to the man behind the bar who wants to act all friendly, and spends most of his night pacing the room like he thinks that’ll give him any sort of edge.

He should rest.

Even if he doesn’t sleep, he should rest.

The longer he goes without a decent rest cycle, the more he risks—fatigue.

Fatigue, stupid mistakes, poor judgment, lapsed reaction time—

_Death takes the weak_ , his commanding officer whispers in the back of his mind. _On your feet, soldier—come on, get up, death takes the slow._

Murphy snarls at the empty room.

He knows that.

_Don’t you think I know that? Look what happened to Mbege, after all._

A blast, a wash of red and orange and white against the backs of his retinas, and a heat so intense that they didn’t even bother looking for body parts, after.

_Death takes the weak,_ his commanding officer sighs, and Collins hisses, _Murphy, you idiot, what did I tell you about the big cities_ —

Murphy’s not even going to dignify that with a response. Collins’s definition of a small town would knock even Sangeda and New Bank out of the running, and in the end, it wasn’t like that had been enough to save him, was it?

So it’s not like Collins really gets to dole out survival advice.

When he goes down to refill his water skin, one of the saloon patrons calls out a friendly greeting, waves him over to come and join them for a hand of poker, they need one more player to make things nice and even—

Murphy stares at him without blinking and thinks, _would that be you, Crane? Is this another face you’ve borrowed?_

Then he turns away without answering, ignores the offended bluster from the man in the saloon, and goes to sit upstairs for the rest of the night, ignoring the ghosts in the back of his mind that drape themselves off his shoulders and chatter in his ear.

There are an awful lot of them.

Takes a while for them all to say their piece.

Once, he thinks he might see Emori—hear Emori—whatever—but when he tries to focus in again, she’s gone, and Collins is the only one left, head in his hands and crying _I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean to I didn’t mean—_

It doesn’t matter.

He’s dead, either way.

He lays low.

Sangeda was a mistake.

New Bank was a mistake, for that matter, because that’s at least three or four people who can do a pretty decent job identifying him, once Crane catches up.

So he’ll do it different, this time.

He’ll be better, this time.

He turns his face towards the wall when he passes one of the other lodgers on the stairs, pulls the brim of his hat down low when he steps out onto the street, hums in response to any questions rather than speak and give anyone anything to remember.

It’s easier, he guesses.

And honestly, most people aren’t looking to learn too much.

This town’s got its own troubles, just like New Bank—just like Sangeda—and they’re so caught up in all their little dramas that it’s pretty easy for him to slide by unnoticed.

He’ll only be here for a few days, after all, just long enough to lay a false trail before doubling back the way he’s come, and this town will serve its purpose well enough, in that sense.

That’s good, Murphy thinks.

This town, it’s a little too tense for his liking.

There’s some big hotshot rancher to the east, pushing in on the settler’s borders, and things will come to a head sooner or later, from the looks of it, and it’s not like the town’s sheriff is doing a damn thing to stop it, so that if Murphy had to guess, he’d say some money changed hands along the way—

It’s none of his business.

But the town is so tense, and there’s an undercurrent of _waiting_ running all up and down the streets, and it makes for a lot of nasty echoes in his head that could almost be memories, if he looked at them too closely.

He doesn’t.

He _doesn’t_.

Some of the rancher’s hands come into town on his first morning, throw their weight around while he watches from beneath the brim of his hat, hassling the settlers and shouting and generally making themselves into real nuisances.

When they’ve finally gotten their kicks in and ride off again, laughing and bickering good-naturedly, something about it sticks in his throat, and when he turns around, he’s not surprised to see the little girl from the City of Light, staring up at him with empty eyes.

“You’re not here,” Murphy tells her, and she looks past him to stare out at the dusty street.

_You’re not here._

_You’re dead._

_I killed you._

_I didn’t mean to_ , Collins whispers in the back of his mind. _I was only following orders_ —

“Shut up,” Murphy tells him, and the little girl laughs until she cries, and then stands there crying long after he’s gone.

_This is what they all understand: it’s fair._

_It’s all very fair._

_It’s all very just._

_Decisions have to made, during times of war, but there’s no call for keeping evidence of those decisions around, not now that everything is over and everything is peace._

_The scientists who made monsters to fight monsters, they gets medals and speeches, and in time they will speak sadly, nostalgically, of the horrible costs of war._

_Everyone is very satisfied by the results of the tribunal._

_Except—_

_Question: how do you kill a supersoldier?_

_Answer: doesn’t matter._

_Just make sure you get them all._

Really, it’s all Collins’s fault.

Or maybe it’s his commanding officer’s fault, or maybe it’s that stupid little girl’s fault, or maybe it’s just his own damn fault for not keeping his nose in his own business and getting out of town while he had the chance.

That last one’s looking more and more likely, these days.

Because, first of all, he’s let himself get rusty.

It’s been months since he’s left Sangeda, longer since he stole that cruiser, and while the upgrades just won’t allow for skill degradation beyond a certain point, he’s let himself get used to just sliding in and out of the background, unnoticed and unimportant and uninvolved.

So when the rancher’s thugs hit the main store in broad daylight, it takes him by surprise.

It takes him by surprise, and he acts without thinking, and that’s not so much of a surprise as it is the kind of thing that would have gotten him bawled out by his commanding officer, back in the day.

Because he’s in the way, and one of the sad, laughably delusional thugs, one of them shoves him hard into a shelf of dried goods, gets right up in his face—

“Stay out of my way!” the man snarls, yellow teeth bared in a sneer. “You think you can try and stop me, huh, tough guy?”

And Murphy throws him straight through the door and out into the street—

Things happen, after that, and there’s a lot of shouting, and people are rushing at him, and he acts, because that is what he has always done, because that is what he was made to do—

When it’s over, he leaves.

Doesn’t get very far.

Doesn’t get five miles outside of town before reinforcements arrive, and there are lots of them, all on horseback, and one of them gets off a lucky shot, knocks him into the dust and kicks him again and again—

“Who do you think you are?” he demands, and Murphy wonders whether this might not be the hotshot rancher himself. “Who are you—”

And all at once, Murphy is standing in a line, and Collins is on one side, and John on the other—John Mbege, who barely even made it out of basic training, when Collins made it all the way to the end of the war—

_Who are you?_

_Answer me, soldier! Who are you?_

He can feel the floor beneath his feet, hands clasped obedient behind his back.

He knows the answer.

“ _Ain bedo ste nou ain_ ,” says the creature who calls himself Murphy. “ _Ai laik nou a raunon. Ai laik a gon_.”

He kills every last one of them, and then he runs.

When he finally stops, he doesn’t have a clue where he is.

_I am not mine,_ John Mbege says, practiced and sorrowful, because he knew the words, too, they all knew the words. _I am not a person. I am a weapon_ —

“Shut up,” Murphy says out loud, and he stares up at the stars.

His commanding officer scoffs.

_Death takes the slow_ , he says, or maybe he says, _Yu laik nou yun. Nu bedo ste nou youn_.

_Do you understand?_

_Soldier, do you understand?_

The little girl from the City of Light, she doesn’t say anything at all.

She never does.

How could she?

He never heard her voice, so it’s not like his mind can conjure up anything for her to say.

Murphy breathes out, watches his breath fog up the air in front of him, hanging in front of him like the spray of mist from a bullet.

His shoulder hurts.

His shoulder hurts, and so does his stomach, and his head, where the stupid would-be cattle baron kicked him into the dust.

His broken bones are healing, and he’s riding a stolen horse.

That’s funny.

He doesn’t remember taking the horse.

Murphy tries to remember what the stars looked like, at home.

He tries to remember where these stars should be, if he’s still headed in the right direction.

The pain of the healing is too much, and so he stops, wonders where Crane is, knows it’s only a matter of time and knows he’s showed his hand  _ again,  _ like an idiot.

The bullet holes in his back take the longest to heal.

Murphy grits his teeth against it, breathes in and out, the way they taught him to do, and runs a brief diagnostic scan to make sure that none of the internal organs were damaged.

They were, of course, but not beyond repair.

Murphy breathes in and out again, tips his head back to watch the stars.

There are no birds up there tonight.

That’s lucky.

His mouth still tastes like blood, and he rinses it out twice, spits his precious water into the dirt and picks skin and blood and bone matter out from beneath his fingernails.

_ Well,  _ someone says, and he looks over to see Emori sitting beside him, eyes fixed on the stars.  _ That sure was something. _

“You shouldn’t be here,” he tells her, and his voice feels scratchy, worn out like he’s forgotten how to shape the words. “You’re not a ghost. I saved you.”

She looks at him, unimpressed.

“I  _ saved  _ you,” he says.

Emori shrugs.

_ Then what am I doing here?  _ she asks, and he wants to laugh.

“ _ Yu nou sen in,”  _ he says instead, like an apology. “ _ Ai laik nou a raunon—” _

_ Yeah,  _ Emori says.  _ Caught that part. _

“ _ Ai laik nou ain,”  _ he says, and she scoffs and says,  _ Well? Whose are you, then? _

_ This is what he knows: he has to run. _

_ There’s no way for it. _

_ If he were better, perhaps—a better soldier or maybe just a better man—perhaps he would have stayed. _

_ He should have stayed, because he did things that were wrong (he followed orders) and he knows the penalty is just and fair and probably the right thing. _

_ But he doesn’t want to die. _

_ At the end of the day, he has never wanted—will never want—to die. _

_ So he runs. _

_ He runs until running is impossible, and still they follow him. _

_ This is justice, too. _

It takes him nearly twenty-three hours to heal up completely, and Emori is still there.

Not actually, of course, not any more than the girl from the City of Light is there, or than Collins is there, or than John or Myles or Connors or any of the other poor, stupid toy soldiers who couldn’t run fast enough are there.

But she’s still there, and she’s behind him when he lurches his way up into the saddle, looking around with a mild sort of interest at the scenery that slides past.

_ I didn’t mean to,  _ Collins starts to say once, and Emori says,  _ But you did it anyways. _

Collins vanishes, and he doesn’t reappear for a full day and a half, after that.

So that’s a pretty neat trick.

Dimly, Murphy’s aware that she shouldn’t be there.

“You’re still alive,” he tells her once, towards sundown. “Don’t you have better places to be?”

She gives him a Look at that.

_ Don’t ask me,  _ she says, sounding only a little bit annoyed.  _ You’re the one dragging me halfway across California, genius. _

“Right,” Murphy says. “Right, I know, it’s just—you’re not real.”

_ Figured that one out on your own, did you? _

Really, though, she shouldn’t be here, and part of him feels kind of bad about it, because he knows she’s not real, knows she’s just another side effect of the poison racing through his veins, and Myles used to complain about this, before they tracked him down.

But even if she’s not real, he still feels a little guilty, because it’s not like she would’ve agreed to come with him—Emori, that is, the  _ real  _ Emori—and so it’s probably not right to be lugging her ghost around with him.

Probably seven different kinds of creepy, and it  _ is  _ enough to make him feel sort of bad about the whole thing, enough to make him think that he should probably make her leave, that he probably shouldn’t be doing this in the first place.

_ Not without asking permission,  _ Emori agrees, very serious.  _ You should probably go back and ask for permission. _

“I can’t go back,” he tells her. “I can’t. Crane—there are people following me.”

_ Of course there are,  _ she says.  _ So? _

“I can’t lead them back to Sangeda,” he says, because he knows that this is right, or at least as close to right as he can get.

Emori rolls her eyes.

_ So?  _ she says again, and he finally understands.

“Oh,” he says.

Emori raises an eyebrow.

“I’m an idiot,” he says, and she laughs, and when he turns to look over his shoulder at her one more time, he’s not surprised to see that she’s already gone.

It’s a strange little world, this place where he’s found himself.

Too small by half for the amount of creatures crammed onto its surface, and a frankly bizarre approach to heat retention, given that half the cycle is spent actively straining away from the nearest guiding star, and the pale colors of the whole world are still something that he’s getting used to.

He still misses the stars at home—still misses the sky at home.

But it’s alright.

In time, Murphy thinks, he’ll forget that, too.

He spends another day and a half laying a trail that points south, because that was the original plan, to keep heading south, and he might as well stick with what he knows, at this point.

Then he rides north again, and he doesn’t bother hiding his tracks.

The false trail will slow Crane down, but not by much.

They’ll come for him, sooner or later.

But this time—

This time—

He’s not a religious sort.

Never has been, even before.

Doesn’t really believe in fate or destiny or anything as silly as that.

If he had, he certainly would’ve had it burned out of him by the time the ships dropped them into the City of Light.

But he does believe in—something.

Call it  _ functionality. _

There are things he’s good at and there are things that he was good at until the cutting started, and then he became nearly perfect.

So maybe those are the things that he was meant to do.

Murphy slows his pace, drags his feet as he heads north once more, sticks to the coast and remembers the things he was made to do, how to cover his face and slur his words to be utterly unremarkable, how to tamp down the little peculiarities that would make any self-respecting human recognize the wrongness, the strangeness, the  _ otherness. _

But he’s leaving a trail.

He’s leaving a trail, and it isn’t false this time, and part of him wants to scream or maybe just laugh out loud at his own stupidity, because when in the hell did he start believing in fairy tales, exactly?

His ghosts are mostly quiet.

The gulls shriek overhead, and the sound sends a shiver down his spine, but they’re only standard-issue seagulls, real and verifiable and flesh and blood, the whole package.

The gulls shriek, and the waves crash against the shoreline far below, and he doesn’t know what he’s looking for, only that he’ll know it when he sees it.

The nights grow colder as he heads north, and he washes the salt off his skin in the morning, fills his canteen whenever he gets the chance, and he keeps moving through this strange, foreign world.

_ Here is a difference: the sky is blue, here. _

_ The sky is blue, except for the places where it isn’t, and then it’s gray, or maybe it’s red, or maybe it’s some other color and changing by the second. _

_ He’s still running. _

_ He thinks he will spend his whole life running. _

_ His whole life has the potential to be a very long time. _

_ He keeps running, and the ground beneath his feet goes from smooth cobblestones to hard-packed dirt and then to dust and an endless stretch of earth. _

_ So many differences, but this, at least, is familiar to him. _

When he finds himself back in New Bank, it's not a surprise.

Maybe it should be.

Things don't really surprise him all that much, these days, though, and so when he starts to recognize his surroundings, the slope of the hills down towards the sea, it's not so much as surprise as it is a dull pang of  _ oh, right, well, of course. _

He takes his stolen horse to the stables, and the kid he'd paid to watch the first horse asks where he got this new one.

"Don't know," he says, because he'd already treated the brand on the horse's flank, so no one can trace it back. "Just sort of found it wandering."

The kid's smarter than he looks, though, because he just takes the dollar Murphy hands him and leaves it at that.

The bird finds him less than twenty-four hours later.

Murphy stands out in the street and watches it wheel past overhead, looks it dead in its beady red eyes and thinks, here I am, Crane.

Come get that bounty and let's be done with it.

Then he goes into the saloon and sits down at the bar.

"Something on your mind?" the bartender asks, and he isn't Emori, but there is something of her practiced professionalism in the older man's bearing. "Didn't think we'd see you again."

"Didn't think you would, either," Murphy admits, and taps one finger against the surface of the bar.

He toys with his options, turns them over and over in his head.

"Listen," he says, just as the bartender's starting to move away again. "Something's going to happen tomorrow. Maybe tonight. But tomorrow by the latest."

The bartender hesitates, looks him over with a newly wary expression.

"I'll try to keep it out of town," Murphy promises. "I'll do everything I can to keep it out of town. But is there any way you could maybe get word out about that?"

The bartender considers him.

"And just what would you be wanting us to do about it?" he asks, and Murphy laughs a little, because the older man has misunderstood.

"Nothing," he says. "Don't want any of you to do a thing. Do you understand?"

The bartender looks at him, and Murphy thinks of the kid in the stables, the little old lady who cut his hair for him, the people who pretended like they knew him when he walked into the saloon.

(He thinks of the little girl from the City of Light, the way she'd darted out into the street, terrified and confused and so stupid that it still makes his smile ache from clenching his teeth, because she wouldn't have been a target if her parents had only kept her inside, but she was on the street, and that meant—that meant—)

(He followed his orders.)

(Just like Collins.)

"Keep everybody off the streets," he says. "It'll be over by tomorrow night. One way or the other. But could you make sure no one gets in the way?"

It sounds harsher than he means it to.

But the old bartender studies him for a moment longer, and then, at last, he nods.

"Thank you," Murphy says, and means it.

He pays for his drink, goes up to his room and sits on the bed for the first time.

It's not a bad bed, as far as beds go.

He sits on the bed, loads and reloads the primitive gun that he'd bought on a steamboat in Mississippi somewhere, because the man who was cheating him at cards had been so adamant that he needed some sort of protection, way out west—

Then he disassembles and cleans every part of the blaster he's carried with him since before the City of Light, since before Collins, since before John Mbege died in that first firefight, so long ago.

He waits three hours, and then he rides out of the city, out to the wide-open prairie that stretches away in every direction, and he waits.

Six hours total.

Heskel Crane comes to kill him, and Murphy sits and waits.

"Been a long time," Crane says, as soon as he's within range.

"Yes, sir," Murphy says.

Some habits die hard.

"I didn't want to have to do this," Crane says, and Murphy says, "Neither did I."

He doesn't mean it like that.

Really, he only means to refer to the space between them, the rest of Crane's hunters who are crowding close behind the older man's horse, the way his back still aches and he's so very tired of running.

But Crane's eyes flare, suddenly, and Murphy realizes he's misspoken, and that's not exactly out of the ordinary, either.

"You volunteered, soldier," he says. "You knew what you were signing up for."

"Yeah," Murphy says. "Yeah, I guess I did."

He didn't, of course.

They didn't really spell it out, when he first signed up.

But he probably should have known.

He thinks, somehow, that he probably should have known.

One of the other hunters nudges his own horse closer, whispers something to Crane, too soft for even upgraded ears to hear.

"It's him," Crane says. "I'm sure."

The other hunter looks at the readout on her scanner, looks back at Murphy, and then she shrugs, eases her horse back into place behind their leader.

Crane watches Murphy, and Murphy watches the other hunter, wonders how old she was when the war ended.

She can't be much older than Mbege was, at the start.

He wonders if she even remembers how it was.

It's been such a long time.

Once he's gone, he wonders, will anyone remember?

Crane might.

But Crane will choose to forget.

And then there will be nothing left.

To his credit, Crane doesn't gloat.

Part of Murphy expects him to gloat, remembers the long-winded speeches, the feel of the smooth dropship floor beneath his feet, Collins on one side and Mbege on the other, hands clasped behind his back as Crane paces back and forth—

He doesn't gloat.

Instead, he looks at Murphy like he can tell what he's thinking, like he can tell he's counting back the days and wondering how young the whole crew of hunters arrayed behind him must have been.

"It's a shame," he says, and Murphy turns his head, looks him straight on. "But the Council has made their decision, you know they have."

Murphy wonders if the Council members were in the City of Light.

He doesn't think they were.

He doesn't think they remember the poison.

"Yes, sir," he says out loud.

There's not much else for him to say.

He swings his leg over the horse, slides down off the saddle, and slaps its flank, sends it back towards New Bank, barely visible on the horizon and so very far away.

He is a good soldier.

He will limit collateral damage.

_ Ah _ , Crane says—not _ this  _ Crane, but the Crane that still lurks in the back of his mind.  _ But sometimes, that is not the objective. _

_ Sometimes, an example must be made. _

Is he an example?

Will he be an example for the hunters, when they go back home and leave him cooling here?

"Alright," he says, and Crane watches him. "Let's get this over with."

His hands are empty.

He walks towards the crew of hunters—seven including Crane, standard deployment, no more and no less—and he doesn't draw his weapon, because he knows the answer to Crane's question, and Crane knows the question and knows that he doesn't need one.

Crane stares down at him.

Then he laughs, and Murphy lets himself smile, and Crane laughs with all his teeth, the way he did outside of the City of Light, when Murphy had laughed, too, even though it wasn't very funny, not at all.

"Oh, Murphy," Crane says at last, and his hands are empty, too, but his voice is still in the back of Murphy's mind, whispering,  _ you are not your own _ and  _ death takes the weak _ and  _ you are not a man, you are a weapon, now get on your feet, soldier, on your feet _ —"Oh, John, do you really think I'm that stupid?"

The hunters break first, and then everything is chaos.

Murphy dodges the first shot, but the second one gets him in the shoulder, and he can feel his mind wanting to go blank, wanting to retreat into the haze of destruction, but he can't, he has to be smart about this, he has to keep his mind—

_ Death takes the slow _ , Crane roars in his memory, and the Crane in front of him fires three shots in quick succession, and Murphy tastes the burn of ozone in his lungs, twists wildly to avoid a strike from one of the hunters that would have taken his head clean off its shoulders, and that's not exactly something that the upgrades can heal—

_ I am a weapon,  _ Mbege says from beside him, and Murphy grounds one of the horses, snaps the neck of its rider while it flails and bellows in pain and confusion.  _ I am a weapon— _

He is a soldier.

He will limit collateral damage.

There is pain racing up his side, bright and blinding, and he can barely breathe past the panic that wants to force itself to the front of his mind, but he can't, he has to keep his head—

One of the hunters drops, and then another, and Murphy is what he was made to be, he is a weapon, and he has been aimed and pointed and fired, and now he is aiming himself back, back at the ones who made him into a monster.

_ I didn't mean to, _ Collins wails, and Murphy hears an echo that he can't quite place.  _ I didn't mean to—I just followed orders— _

_ But you did it anyways. _

_ Sometimes, an example must be made. _

There are only a few hunters left, and pain erupts along Murphy's spine, sends him reeling, stumbling to the ground, and the little girl is there, too, because why the hell not, right?

Myles warned about this, before the end, about carrying the ghosts of the City of Light with them wherever they went, about how they were always waiting, always watching.

Waiting for what?

Watching for what?

The hunter who downed him drives a knife between his ribs, and Murphy feels the air leave him in a strangled gasp, feels the point of the blade twist into his lungs and knows he won't heal in time—

He forces the blade further into his own side, breaks the fingers of the hunter who stabbed him, wrenches the knife free, and it's just a second too late—

He's running out of time—

_ NOW, _ the little girl says, and Murphy swings without looking, drives the knife up through the hunter's jaw and rips it free once more.

And then—

Everything is silent.

The little girl is gone.

Crane is nowhere to be seen.

Crane is nowhere to be seen, and there is a cloud of dust heading back towards New Bank, and Murphy watches it go, and for a second, he doesn't understand.

_ I am not my own, _ he thinks.  _ I am not mine. _

_ Well?  _ Emori asks, and he can't turn to look at her, he can't make himself turn to look at her.  _ Whose are you, then? _

He takes one of the horses that the hunters left behind, because he remembers the way that Crane had laughed outside of the City of Light, and he knows how these things are done—

Crane is waiting for him in the street outside the saloon, and maybe there are people watching, or maybe there aren't, but Murphy thinks it doesn't matter either way.

_ Cliche _ , he thinks, watching the older man square his shoulders.  _ God, but this is all so cliche. _

Crane is waiting for him.

" _ Yu laik nou yun, _ " he calls, voice dry and cruel in the early morning light. " _ Yu laik nou yun. _ "

"Maybe," Murphy says. "But I'm not yours, either."

_ I am not a man. _

Crane laughs again, like he should've seen that coming.

Crane goes for his gun, and so does Murphy, and they both shoot at the exact same time.

(The weapon fires.)

Crane falls.

It's over.

_ This is the way it ends— _

_ This is the way it was always going to end— _

_ Two men are standing in the street— _

_ (And the sky above them is blue, or maybe it’s only gray, but it isn’t purple, not anymore, and both of them are so very far from home.) _

_ (And there are so many others hidden in the blood on each one’s hands, far too many to ever be silent.) _

_ Question: how do you win a war? _

_ Question: how do you kill a soldier? _

_ Question: _

_ This is the way it ends: two men are standing in the street. _

“I’m alright,” Murphy says for the fifteen billionth time. “I’m fine.”

He won’t let them look at his injuries.

They will take time to heal, of course, but that’s only to be expected.

He just wants to be well enough to ride.

That takes more time than he would’ve liked, because he still can’t believe that it’s over, he still can’t believe that he’s free, and so it goes against every instinct he’s ever had programmed into him to just lie there and wait for the next thing to happen.

There will be others.

Of course there will be others.

But Crane was different.

Crane was the last link to the old drop team, the last one who really knew him well enough to be able to hunt him down in the first place.

So maybe it will be alright.

Maybe he’ll have just a little bit of time.

Murphy waves away the small-town medic— _ doctor,  _ he reminds himself,  _ doctor,  _ because his injuries had made him absent-minded and loose-lipped, at the end, and he’s still worried that he may have let something slip—and the man looks at him very doubtfully, but doesn’t press it.

Murphy waits until the doctor leaves before he forces himself up into a sitting position, stares out the window at the bright blue sky.

His lungs are burning.

That’s to be expected.

Hunters like to use poison blades, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise that some of the results are starting to make themselves seen now, after the end.

His lungs are burning, and he has blaster burns across his back and shoulders, along with a few regular bullet holes, just for variety, because no one ever said that Crane wasn’t good at adapting to local tech.

And he’s got a knife wound in his side and a ragged hole in his left leg, and the bones in his left hand were shattered almost beyond recognition, so that trying to make a fist sends a wave of pain crashing over him—

But they’re healing.

It’ll be alright.

Murphy leans back in his bed, and the room around him is so very silent.

Collins is gone.

So is Mbege, and Crane vanished the second his body hit the ground, and he hasn’t seen the little girl since she spoke to him on the prairie.

Emori is gone, too.

_ There’s a fix for that,  _ Murphy thinks, wry.

He’s not stupid enough to think they’ll all stay gone.

He doesn’t dream, not really, but he thinks the ghosts that shadow him are about as close to dreams as anyone of them will ever get.

For now, though, they’re gone, and his room is blessedly quiet.

So that’s alright, too.

He should get another haircut, he thinks absently.

Been a while since he was through New Bank the first time, and it’s not like he’s done himself any favors in that department since.

He still has his face.

He still has his face, and he still has his blaster, and he still has the borrowed Sangeda horse that the kid’s still keeping an eye on in the stables.

It’s a pretty good start, he thinks.

All things considered and all things being equal.

But he really should think about getting a haircut.

How long does it take humans to heal?

These are things he didn’t really think about before.

That’s the tricky part about staying in one place for too long.

_ Oh, well,  _ Murphy thinks.  _ Better get used to that, I suppose. _

Maybe.

If he’s lucky.

If he’s very, very lucky.

But then again, his luck’s been holding up more or less okay so far.

(All things considered.)

The man who calls himself Murphy stays in New Bank for another week complete, until the holes in his side and back and legs have closed enough that he feels safe riding again.

Then he climbs back up into the saddle, touches his heels to the horse’s side, and turns the horse’s head north, back towards Sangeda and the Wyoming county line.

_ This is the way it begins: somewhere to stay, something to drink, someone to talk to. _

_ The world is empty, and the future unspools before him, open and unwritten, and no orders and no questions and no monsters beyond the stars. _

_ And the surface of the bar is cool beneath his hands, and the dust is settling in the streets outside, and there is a moment, just a moment, where there is no fear. _

_ He lays his hands flat on the bar, and his hands don’t shake. _

_ This is the way it begins: a room, a drink, and some company. _


End file.
